A predominantly one-topic blog: how is it that the most imminent and lethal implication for humankind - the fact that the doctrine of "Mutually Assured Destruction" will not work with Iran - is not being discussed in our media? Until it is recognized that MAD is dead, the Iranian threat will be treated as a threat only to Israel and not as the global threat which it in fact is.
A blog by Mladen Andrijasevic

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Saturday, August 20, 2016

This photo, grabbed from Russian Defense Ministry video footage issued Aug. 16, is said to show a Tu-22M3 long-range bomber releasing its payload above Syria after it took off from an air base in Iran. (Russian Defense Ministry

This week Russian bombers flew out ofIranian air basesto attack rebel positions in Syria. The State Department pretended
not to be surprised. It should be. It should be alarmed. Iran’s intensely
nationalistic revolutionary regime had never permitted foreign forces to
operate from its soil. Until now.

The reordering of the Middle East is
proceeding apace. Where for 40 years the U.S.-Egypt alliance anchored the
region, a Russia-Iran condominium is now dictating events. That’s what you get
after eight years of U.S. retrenchment and withdrawal. That’s what results from
the nuclear deal with Iran, the evacuation of Iraq and utter U.S. immobility on
Syria. Consider:

●Iran

The nuclear deal was supposed to begin a
rapprochement between Washington and Tehran. Instead, it has solidified a
strategic-military alliance between Moscow and Tehran. With the lifting of
sanctions and the normalizing of Iran’s international relations, Russia rushed
in with major deals, including theshipmentof S-300 ground-to-air missiles. Russian use of Iranian bases now
marks a new level of cooperation and joint power projection.

●Iraq

These bombing runs cross Iraqi airspace.
Before President Obama’s withdrawal from Iraq, that could not have happened.
The resulting vacuum has not only created a corridor for Russian bombing, it
has gradually allowed a hard-won post-Saddam Iraq to slip into Iran’s orbit.
According to a Baghdad-based U.S. military spokesman, there are 100,000 Shiite
militiafightersoperating inside
Iraq, 80 percent of them Iranian-backed.

●Syria

When Russia dramaticallyintervenedlast year, establishing air bases and launching a savage bombing
campaign, Obama did nothing. Indeed, he smuglypredictedthat Vladimir Putin had entered a quagmire. Some quagmire. Bashar
al-Assad’s regime is not only saved. It encircled Aleppo and has seized the
upper hand in the civil war. Meanwhile, our hapless secretary of state is
running around trying tosue for peace,
offering to share intelligence and legitimize Russian intervention if only
Putin will promise to conquer gently.

Consider what Putin has achieved. Dealt a very
weak hand — a rump Russian state, shorn of empire and saddled with a backward
economy and a rusting military — he has restored Russia to great-power status.
Reduced to irrelevance in the 1990s, it is now a force to be reckoned with.

In Europe, Putin has unilaterally redrawn
the map. His annexation of Crimea will not be reversed. The Europeans are eager
to throw off the few sanctions they grudgingly imposed on Russia. And the rape
of eastern Ukraine continues.

Ten thousand have alreadydiedand now Putin is threatening even more open warfare. Under the
absurd pretext of Ukrainian terrorism in Crimea (reminiscent of Hitler’s claim
that he invaded Poland in response to a Polish border incursion), Putin has
threatenedretaliation,
massed troops ineight locationson the Ukrainian border, ordered Black Sea naval exercises and
moved advanced anti-aircraft batteries into Crimea, giving Moscow control over
much of Ukrainian airspace.

And why shouldn’t he? He’s pushing on an open
door. Obama still refuses to send Ukraine even defensive weapons. The
administration’s response to these provocations? Urging “both sides” to
exercise restraint. Both sides, mind you.

And in a gratuitous flaunting of its
newly expanded reach, Russia will be conducting joint naval exercises with
China in the South China Sea, in obvious support of Beijing’s territorial
claims andillegal military bases.

Yet the president shows little concern.
He is too smart not to understand geopolitics; he simply doesn’t care. In part
because his priorities are domestic. In part because he thinks we lack clean
hands and thus the moral standing to continue to play international arbiter.

And in part because he’s convinced that in the
long run it doesn’t matter. Fluctuations in great power relations are
inherently ephemeral. For a man who seesa moral arc in the universe bending inexorably toward justice,
calculations of raw realpolitik are 20th-century thinking — primitive,
obsolete, the obsession of small minds.

Obama made all this perfectly clear in
speeches at the U.N., in Cairo and here at home in his very first year in
office. Two terms later, we see the result. Ukraine dismembered. Eastern Europe
on edge. Syria a charnel house. Iran subsuming Iraq. Russia and Iran on the
march across the entire northern Middle East.

At the heart of this disorder is a simple
asymmetry. It is in worldview. The major revisionist powers — China, Russia and
Iran — know what they want: power, territory, tribute. And they’re going after
it. Barack Obama takes Ecclesiastes’ view that these are vanities, nothing but
vanities.

In the kingdom of heaven, no doubt. Here
on earth, however — Aleppo to Donetsk, Estonia to the Spratly Islands — it
matters greatly.

*****

My only comment is that there is now 153 days 6 hours
and 14 minutes left until Obama leaves office

An Israeli heavyweight judoka named Or Sasson defeated
an Egyptian opponent named Islam El Shehaby Friday in a first-round match at
the Rio Olympics. The Egyptian refused to shake his opponent’s extended hand,
earning boos from the crowd. Mr. Sasson went on to win a bronze medal.

If you want the short answer for why the Arab world is
sliding into the abyss, look no further than this little incident. It did
itself in chiefly through its long-abiding and all-consuming hatred of Israel,
and of Jews.

That’s not a point you will find in a long article about
the Arab crackup by Scott Andersonin last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, where hatred
of Israel is treated like sand in Arabia—a given of the landscape. Nor is it
much mentioned in the wide literature about the legacy of colonialism in the
Middle East, or the oil curse, governance gap, democracy deficit, youth bulge,
sectarian divide, legitimacy crisis and every other explanation for Arab
decline.

Yet the fact remains that over the past 70 years the Arab
world got rid of its Jews, some 900,000 people, while holding on to its hatred
of them. Over time the result proved fatal: a combination of lost human
capital, ruinously expensive wars, misdirected ideological obsessions, and an
intellectual life perverted by conspiracy theory and the perpetual search for
scapegoats. The Arab world’s problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the
name for that problem is anti-Semitism.

As a historical phenomenon, this is not unique. In a 2005 essay in Commentary, historianPaul Johnson noted
that wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline almost
inevitably followed.

Spain expelled its Jews with the Alhambra Decree of 1492.
The effect, Mr. Johnson noted, “was to deprive Spain (and its colonies) of a
class already notable for the astute handling of finance.” In czarist Russia,
anti-Semitic laws led to mass Jewish emigration as well as an “immense increase
in administrative corruption produced by the system of restrictions.” Germany
might well have won the race for an atomic bomb if Hitler hadn’t sent Albert
Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller into
exile in the U.S.

These patterns were replicated in the Arab world.
Contrary to myth, the cause was not the creation of the state of Israel. There
were bloody anti-Jewish pogroms in Palestine in 1929, Iraq in 1941, and Lebanon
in 1945. Nor is it accurate to blame Jerusalem for fueling anti-Semitism by
refusing to trade land for peace. Among Egyptians, hatred of Israel barely
abated after Menachem Begin relinquished the Sinai to Anwar Sadat. Among
Palestinians, anti-Semitism became markedly worse during the years of the Oslo
peace process.

In his essay, Mr. Johnson called anti-Semitism a “highly
infectious” disease capable of becoming “endemic in certain localities and
societies,” and “by no means confined to weak, feeble or commonplace
intellects.” Anti-Semitism may be irrational, but its potency, he noted, lies
in transforming a personal and instinctive irrationalism into a political and
systematic one. For the Jew-hater, every crime has the same culprit and every
problem has the same solution.

Anti-Semitism makes the world seem easy. In doing so, it
condemns the anti-Semite to a permanent darkness.

Today there is no great university in the Arab world, no
serious indigenous scientific base, a stunted literary culture. In 2015 the
U.S. Patent Office reported 3,804 patents from Israel, as compared with 364
from Saudi Arabia, 56 from the United Arab Emirates, and 30 from Egypt. The
mistreatment and expulsion of Jews has served as a template for the persecution
and displacement of other religious minorities: Christians, Yazidis, the
Baha’i.

Hatred of Israel and Jews has also deprived the Arab
world of both the resources and the example of its neighbor. Israel quietly
supplies water to Jordan, helping to ease the burden of Syrian refugees, and
quietly provides surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities to Egypt to fight
ISIS in the Sinai. But this is largely unknown among Arabs, for whom the only
permissible image of Israel is an Israeli soldier in riot gear, abusing a
Palestinian.

Successful nations make a point of trying to learn from
their neighbors. The Arab world has been taught over generations only to hate
theirs.

This may be starting to change. In the past five years
the Arab world has been forced to face up to its own failings in ways it cannot
easily blame on Israel. The change can be seen in the budding rapprochement
between Jerusalem and Cairo, Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, which might yet yield
tactical and strategic advantages on both sides, particularly against common
enemies such as ISIS and Iran.

That’s not enough. So long as an Arab athlete can’t pay
his Israeli opposite the courtesy of a handshake, the disease of the Arab mind
and the misfortunes of its world will continue. For Israel, this is a pity. For
the Arabs, it’s a calamity. The hater always suffers more than the object of
his hatred.****It would be more accurate to say that the Muslim world has a problem of the mind, and its name is anti-Semitism.

Saturday, August 6, 2016

What
could President Obama have been thinking when he claimed that Israel’s
“military and security community” now supports his disastrous nuclear deal with
Iran?

“The country that was most
opposed to the deal,” he said at his Thursday press conference, “acknowledges
this has been a game-changer.”

Well, it didn’t take long for
those same officials to put the lie to the president’s claim — and in unusually
undiplomatic language.

Israel’s Defense Ministry, in
an official statement, compared the deal to the infamous 1938 Munich accord,
whose “basic assumption, that Nazi Germany could be a partner to any kind of
agreement, was wrong.”

Similarly, it added,
“agreements of this kind signed between the world powers and Iran,” which
“states openly” it aims to destroy Israel, are also useless.

Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu — who was outspoken in trying to halt the deal — sought to soften the
statement’s impact by stressing the strength of the US-Israeli relationship.
But, he added pointedly, Israel’s position “remains unchanged.”

Yes, some former Israeli
defense officials have said the deal could present future “opportunities” — but
also cite its troubling “challenges.”

And one Cabinet minister who
is a top Netanyahu adviser, Tzachi Hanegbi, insisted that not only is Israel
not on board with the nuke deal, but rather “the opposite is the case” and that
“all our worries . . . were justified.”

All of which is understandable:
Iran continues to pursue its ballistic-missile program, in violation of UN
edicts. It remains, according to Obama’s own State Department, the world’s
leading sponsor of terror. And when the deal expires, it will be just weeks
from acquiring a nuclear bomb.

The president says the deal’s
most outspoken critics should make public mea culpas and apologize. But if
anyone deserves a mea culpa and an apology, it’s Netanyahu — from Obama.

****

I’ve spent the last
month reading David McCullough’s biographies of Harry Truman and John Adams, most probably because
I just could not watch any more the news on the presidential race of 2016.

I am still puzzled how
was it possible to conduct diplomacy when it took 6 weeks to cross the
Atlantic. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams,
Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams had to make vital decisions themselves with no
consultation.

What puzzles me even
more today, in the time of instantaneous communication, is how is it possible
that the US government could misrepresent the position of one of its main allies on a subject so vital to the survival
of that ally and not expect that a denial would follow immediately. To what purposes was this done?

Thursday, August 4, 2016

I am so disgusted with the choice of candidates in the US presidential election of 2016, that I found this for me new word from Peggy Noonan’s WSJ article
The
Week They Decided He Was Crazy quite
appropriate:

“I end with a new word, at least new to me. A friend
called it to my attention. It speaks of the moment we’re in. It is
“kakistocracy,” from the Greek. It means government by the worst persons, by
the least qualified or most unprincipled. We’re on our way there, aren’t we?
We’re going to have to make our way through it together.”